Jason deCaires Taylor

Jason deCaires Taylor (born 12 August 1974 in Dover) is a British sculptor and creator of the world’s first underwater sculpture park - the Molinere Underwater Sculpture Park - and underwater museum. He is best known for installing site-specific underwater sculptures which develop into artificial coral reefs integrating his skills as a sculptor, marine conservationist, underwater photographer and scuba diving instructor. His works in Grenada have been listed among the Top 25 Wonders of the World by National Geographic. His most ambitious projects to date are the creation of the world's largest underwater sculpture museum, the Cancún Underwater Museum, situated off the coast between Cancún and Isla Mujeres, Mexico, and Ocean Atlas (2014), a 5-metre tall, 60-ton sculpture off the Bahamas. Taylor is currently based on the island of Lanzarote, Spain, working on a major new underwater museum for the Atlantic Ocean.

The only son of an English father and Guyanese mother, Taylor was educated in Kent with further studies at Camberwell College of Arts Institute of London, where he graduated in 1998 with a B.A Honours degree in Sculpture and Ceramics. Scuba diving from the age of 18, he became a fully qualified scuba instructor in 2002.

Taylor's early work includes Vicissitudes, Grace Reef, The Lost Correspondent and The Unstill Life. All are located in the world´s first public underwater sculpture park in the Caribbean Sea in Molinere Bay, Grenada, West Indies, and situated in a section of coastline that was badly damaged by Hurricane Ivan in 2004.

Taylor’s works create haunting, enigmatic underwater scenes, often depicting the mundaneness of life on dry land transported into an alchemic new environment. Instead of the entropic process typically associated with the ocean's corrosive tendencies, Taylor's pieces encourage organisms to grow and affect the surfaces of his creation. They are often commentaries on humanity’s relationship with the natural world and the need for conservation, decay and rebirth. The majority of his sculptures are based on living people who are life cast and whose phenotypical qualities alter over time as they slowly evolve from inert concrete to living artificial reefs. Taylor considers that he is "trying to portray how human intervention or interaction with nature can be positive and sustainable, an icon of how we can live in a symbiotic relationship with nature."

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